Hi everyone, it's great to see the recent price rise in Steem. I think it's a positive sign for the long term outlook of the Steem blockchain and the rest of the crypto market. I want to continue sharing more advice on gesture drawing from a book that I have been following called 'The Natural Way to Draw' by Kimon Nicolaides. There is a lot of valuable advice that is worth sharing and will help me understand the content further.
Quick gesture drawing of my sister stretching.
When studying gesture it's important to not only look at the movement that the model makes but the impulse in the model that causes the pose in the first place. For example, knowing where the position of the arms or torso is one thing to understand the action but it is important to understand the feeling behind the pose. Is the model alert or tired? Are they tense or relaxed? This is necessary, as you need to participate in what the model is doing as much as possible in order for it to reflect in your drawing.
An exercise to practice this is called potential gesture. You draw not what you see but what you think the model will do next. This will help understand the forces and impulse behind the gesture.
You can get good gestures from drawing people exercising or stretching. Stretches give you more time to draw. These drawings I have done are of my sisters dancing and stretching. It can be quite easy to make mistakes in terms of proportions when doing 10-30 seconds gesture drawings however, this is something that will hopefully improve over time and at the moment gesture is more important to capture.
Do not study first the shape of an arm or even the direction of it, become aware of the gesture. Gesture is intangible and does not have a substance, it is more of a feeling which becomes more apparent the more you practice drawing.
The details can come later but it is important to get the impulse through gesture of the model before anything else as this is what will bring your drawings to life. I will continue to practice drawing in order to become better at this.
As I mentioned earlier practice is the most important part when it comes to gesture. I have done dozens of drawings like this for this exercise but have only shared a few here. If you will do this exercise I encourage you to use very cheap paper such as newsprint or manilla paper and to not be afraid of making mistakes.
@iansart